GERMAN DIVISIONS CROSS RHINE

Timaru Herald, Volume CLVII, Issue 23181, 20 April 1945, Page 5

GERMAN DIVISIONS CROSS RHINE

Heading West As Allied Prisoners (Rec. 9.15 p.m.) LONDON, April 19. A great array of crack divisions, their generals and the entire staff of a German Army Group are crossing the Rhine heading west as prisoners of the American First Army, says Walter Farr, special correspondent in the Ruhr pocket. Some are marching, some skimming along packed into our lorries and some are driving their own vehicles. They have been allowed to do so, because it has been impossible to organise the complete disarming of great chunks of the Wehrmacht. Sullen, captured generals tried to find excuses for the German Army’s supreme fiasco, one ascribing it to too much American material. Finally he admitted: "Your soldiers are good, too.” A whole unit of German W.A.A.C.’s was. captured and uniformed frauleins sobbed, screamed, wrung their hands and wailed: “It is terrible to see our great army give up.” The commanding officer of one division admitted that his men destroyed their own vehicles and surrendered without a fight, pretending that the vehicles had been destroyed by the enemy. Sbme of the German generals quarrelled among themselves. Some were not on speaking terms. A row usually starts over an accusation of surrendering or getting captured. Just before the surrender of the last big force in the Ruhr pocket, fanatical SS men sent two tanks into no man’s land, trained guns on their lines and told the officers: “If j'ou order surrender, we will open fire on you, even though you are Germans.” Americans wiped out the two tanks and the surrender ‘ went on peacefully. Some enemy units were caught issuing discharge papers to soldiers with the idea that they could quickly get civilian clothes and avoid going to prison camps.